How to add SKU to WooCommerce order emails

SKU stands for “Stock Keeping Unit”. SKU is a unique identifier, that refers to the stock of products in the inventory. It is good to add SKU when you add a product but it is not a mandatory field while managing products. In this article, we will see how to add SKU in WooCommerce order emails, sent to the shop manager or site admin.

Using WooCommerce, we can easily include product SKUs within the order notification emails. This can be achieved using the WordPress filter hooks.

When your site has a large number of products or their titles are (more or less) similar, it is always best to have a unique identifier that will help in searching and finding products, here SKU plays the role.

By default, the WooCommerce order email is very simple. When an order is placed, WooCommerce generates an email to the shop manager. The default representation of order detail is below:

You will notice that the products don’t have SKU in them. Here we will be going to add product SKU to WooCommerce order emails. To add SKU we need to add the following PHP snippet in functions.php of your child theme:

// add SKUs to WooCommerce order emails
function w3p_add_sku_to_wc_emails( $args ) {
    $args['show_sku'] = true;
    return $args;
}
add_filter( 'woocommerce_email_order_items_args', 'w3p_add_sku_to_wc_emails' );

The above filter will work for WooCommerce version 2.5 or above. The show_sku should be set to true.

Once you allow SKU to the order email args, the SKU will become visible in the order emails. For example:

Now, the email becomes more informative by adding SKU with the products and the shop manager can find the exact product more precisely.

In the next article, we will learn how to add a product featured thumbnail image in the order email in WooCommerce.